Page 67 of Dial F for Finance

“Because you look like hell and I can’t look away?”

“That, and you’re trying to decide if it’s safe to trust me with whatever you’re thinking about.”

I swallow, the truth caught in my throat. I want to say last night rearranged something in me, that I can’t remember the last time a man gave me an unbroken silence to be sad in, let alone stayed for the aftershocks. I want to say that with him, I feel like a person and not a fortress.

Instead, I say, “I’m not thinking. I’m calculating.”

He lets out a deep chuckle and leans in until my nose is full of sleep-warm skin and the faintest trace of the whiskey from last night.

“That’s a first,” he murmurs, and his lips brush my temple. “Let me know when you’re done, and I’ll help you with the math.”

I tilt my face up and kiss him. It’s small and impulsive—which is a catastrophic tactical error, because Dominic wakes like a predator who was merely being polite.

One second it’s a brush of lips. The next, his hand is at the back of my neck, holding me there while he kisses me properly—slow at first, then with the kind of deepening intent that makes my spine go liquid. I make a small sound into his mouth that I will deny under oath, and he smiles against me like the bastard heard every syllable of it.

“I love it when you kiss me like a woman making terrible decisions on purpose.”

“That is an outrageous overread.”

He rolls us, smooth and inevitable, until I’m on my back and he’s braced over me, hair falling forward, eyes dark and amused and much too awake for a man who was asleep thirty seconds ago. The sheet slips lower on my chest. His gaze follows it. I feel the look like a hand.

“Dominic.”

“Jenna.”

I should stop this. I should ask for water, for aspirin, for a minute to put my armor back on in some approximation of the correct order. Instead, I lie there looking up at him with sunlight all over his shoulders, and I have the humiliating realization that I want this more in daylight than I ever did in the dark.

He studies my face, and it seems like some joke he was about to make catches in his throat and dissolves. He looks at me a beat longer, with that unwavering, hawk-like focus, and for once I don’t flinch. I just reach up, thread my fingers into his hair, and—hating myself for how much I mean it—I say, “Please.”

It’s a prayer and a daredevil’s last words, and Dominic must hear all of it, because his face goes beautifully, terrifyingly still.

“Anything,” he says, and then he’s kissing me hard, open-mouthed, tongue moving against mine in a way that makes my head swim.

His hands are everywhere—my jaw, my neck, my shoulders, and then finally exactly where I need them, palming my breasts through the soft cotton of yesterday’s borrowed T-shirt.

I arch under his touch. The fabric barely counts as a covering, but when he pushes it up, teasing over my ribs and exposing me to the morning, I gasp in a way that sounds nothing like the woman who survived yesterday’s kitchen warfare. His palm is warm and rough for hands that have spent their life negotiating with the world, and the slide of his thumb over my nipple is enough to make logic vaporize.

He smiles, open and pleased, and then dips his head, dragging his mouth down my throat, pausing at the hollow just below my jaw where he can feel my pulse stutter and skip. He bites. Not hard, but definitely more than gentle. I make another undignified sound and claw at his back, and he groans like I’ve given him purchase on reality itself.

When his mouth finds my breast, the counterpoint of teeth and tongue is enough to make me say his name. It feels so foreign, my voice that raw and honest, that I want to cover my face and never show it again. Instead, I wrap my legs around his waist and let him press between my thighs, and the friction is instant, exquisite.

He grinds against me, slow, deliberate, and in the bright white of morning there’s nothing to hide behind. I’m only wearing thin cotton panties beneath his T-shirt, and he’s wearing only a pair of boxers that turn every movement into a direct line of fire. Everything feels new and terrifying and absolutely as it should be.

He pulls back, just a fraction, so he can see my face.

“You sure?” he asks, and it’s the first moment all the charm’s gone out of him. He’s not even smiling now—he’s just searching my face for a panic button, like if I so much as twitch, he’ll abort the mission and talk me down instead.

It undoes me.

I nod. Once, hard.

“Say it, sweetheart. I need to hear the words.”

“Fuck me.”

He shakes his head. Slow. “Try again.”

“Fuck me, Dominic. Please.”